Friday, June 15, 2012

Settling In

Just a rad bus.

What a crazy couple of weeks its been! The day we finally got our
household goods was like Christmas! Our delicious giant couches that had
to be brought in through the living room window, our cushy mattress,
our wonderful cookware, all my art supplies, my book collection (and my
boot collection), all our art, the GRILL, a place to sit and eat...the
JOY!! We worked for three straight days getting everything unpacked,
dusted, and put in its perfect place and hung in the perfect spot. At
the end, it felt so good. We really, really love our little house. A
few excess things had to go, including my obnoxiously heavy file cabinet
(replaced by a much smaller version) and the wine rack (sad, but its
prime is long gone). Serendipitously, the extraction of my wine rack
left the perfect space for a new chest freezer that a neighbor couldn't
fit in their house, so we will be filling that with delicious clean meat
from the farm shop this weekend! Hooray! It is so nice to be in a
place that is easy and enjoyable to keep clean, rather than the bottom
of a dust bowl. I bought a new vacuum and I have never loved a vacuum
so much in my life. It is light, bagless, a sexy shade of red, and it
will suck your face off. Its funny how the things we get excited about
change with age. It is also a really strange but nice feeling knowing
that we are going to be here for 4 years. That is the longest I have
ever lived in one house since I moved out of my parents' house 11 years
ago. Even when I lived in Seattle for 5 years, I lived in 3 different
places throughout that time. So even though we know we will be leaving
after 4 years, it feels like 'us'. My husband has his man cave, I have
my office/studio, and we have our room, our yard, our patio. It is
perfectly wonderful.

The new job is going fabulously, I work with a great group of
people and the work is constant. It is definitely interesting coming on
a few weeks before the biggest event of the year, but it has allowed me
to dive in head first and learn the ropes quickly, which I love.
Another bonus of getting our household goods was having extra art to
decorate my office with, so it is starting to feel much more like
'mine'. I still have a massive blank wall that I would love to mural,
but I have to get some pre-approval so we'll see what happens there. I
also adopted an abandoned plant from an office down the hall and am
nursing it back to health. I should have taken before and after
pictures, it was quite a sad sight. I am also trying my hand at
planting some flowers at home, we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to
channel my Gram and make her proud.

We got the list of holidays and three day weekends for the next
year, so the trip planning has begun. Top of the list are: Canary
Islands, Norway, Iceland, St. Petersburg, Prague and Croatia. There will
be others of course, but we don't want to leave here without checking
those off the list.

*Side note: As I sit here on my lunch break writing this blog, a
torrential rainstorm has suddenly enveloped Lakenheath. It literally
looks like a river is pouring out of the sky. Running from the car to
my building resulted in completely drenched pants and an inside-out
umbrella. The bonus to working in a really old British dorm building is
that the bathroom down the hall from my office is flooding like mad and
it has turned into a fun game to see if the puddle growing on the carpet
is going to make it to my office before the maintenance guys figure out
how to stop it. I wonder how they are faring on the floor below
mine. **Update: It is once again sunny outside and apparently the
bathroom flood was unassociated with the storm, just pure coincidence.
And I thought Montana weather was temperamental.

Otherwise, we have just been settling into a routine with work
schedules and working out... given the very limited CrossFit situation
here that is not conducive to my work schedule, I have purchased my own
equipment and am doing it at home in the mornings before work. Its
working out really well so far, and saves a lot of time not having to
drive somewhere and deal with traffic but just being able to get up, do
it, and then walk the 5 feet to the shower. Magnificent. I really
really miss my old workout crew at Luke, however. It is definitely not
the same without you!!